Quotes & Sayings About Idle Minds

The question that we need to address is this: What relevance do these ancient traditions have to the experience of a modern adolescent growing up in the Western world? Rather than indulge in idle speculation, I have invited a number of young people to express their views on psychedelics and the effects these substances have had upon their lives and minds. — Rick Doblin

Cheer is for fools with idle minds. I am neither a fool nor idle. — Rachel E. Carter

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle. — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Busy mouths grow on idle heads — Agona Apell

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imaging the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.
Which is right?
Neither.
Both.
Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division. — George Saunders

Idle hands make fretful minds. — Shelley Shepard Gray

It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief. — William James

Plough not the seas, sow not the sands,Leave off your idle pain;Seek other mistress for your minds,Love's service is in vain. — Robert Southwell

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination ... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation. — Michel De Montaigne

Idle minds are the devil's research-and-development department. — Robert Stacy McCain

His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty. — Emile Zola

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it. — George Eliot

Busy hands and idle minds have knitted many a sweater; Busy minds and idle hands have knitted many a brow. — Maryrose Wood